The next morning, Ethan wakes and finds himself in a daze, hazy and disorienting like one of those heavy fogs that sometimes roll in off the coast. An empty dorm room full of heavy dust particles cannot forget the unbearable weight of air last night. His evil shadows waiting to pounce hang in the corners of his mind, gnawing like what remains of yesterday's madness. He looks around for Grace's abandoned notes on a desk, filled with frantic scrawl warnings of doom; it is not there. What remains is an unnameable sensation of dread eating on the farthest edges of his consciousness, reminding him things are wrong. The fear of last evening's scene in Room 4A has begun to mutate into a disconcerting void, filling that area in the psyche where the latter's memory should subsist, like a photograph that fades over time, allowing only a ghost of its original outline to remain.
He stares mindlessly at his image in the mirror. His face now seems to him like that of a stranger: The Hollowed has already begun to work at erasing the very being of who he is. The absence of warnings from Grace seems an omen, a herald of the darkness that creeps closer. Her notebook had been - or so he believed - a kind of life buoy and now, with its absence, he felt lost in a sea of confusion. He must remember what it said, the tiny details he had allowed to slip from his fingers like sand. But even more recent events seem to him like a distant and fading nightmare, the edges around memories fraying and unraveling as he struggles to hold onto them.
The sun has just gone down, and then knock! A lone, jarring knock fills the room with the sound of great disturbance, once breaking the stillness. Ethan hesitates for a moment, and the next instant he finds it possible to peel away his fears and open the door. A figure stands statically in front of him, it is Olivia. Her colour is ashen, and her big eyes look like they have emerged from the same nightmare that had invaded his sleep. She enters into the room without waiting for permission, her pursuit of something in the corner that must not be seen gets everyone's gaze scurrying about.
"Ethan... do you recall Grace?" she says, voice shaky and tinged with that familiar fear.
His face describes uncertainty as if flickering like torch flame in a draft. ''Grace? I...I doubt I know anybody of that name." The words weighed down as if shackled under the burden of truth elusive to his understanding.
Olivia's countenance else hardens, confusion to anger now. "Last night, she was with us. She died in Room 4A. Remember that part, right?" Urgency could be heard in her speech, and she fisted her hands, driving her nails deep into the palms, as if trying to compel the truth back to him from memory. The raw emotion brimming in her eyes pierced through the mist in Ethan's mind, but he felt drowned and could not surface for air in the thick sea of muddle.
"I . . ." Ethan begins, but the words feel alien, slippery, and unreachable. His head spins, and within the dull ache at the back of his eyes is a worse omen. Knowing something is indeed true, a fact that just feels like slipping away: like water through his fingers. He can feel the edges of memories blurring, details from that night spilling into fear and uncertainty.
Suddenly, a faint voice fills the space; at first, it sounds milky but definitely. That noise comes wafting out as a form of breathing, so much nearby yet would not sound quite human. A shiver runs over his clothing as he sees Olivia freezing and narrowing her eyes, going over the house searching for sound.
"Did you hear that?" she asks as though she is talking to the walls, barely more than a whisper, her words quaking with fear.
He is sharply focused. His heart begins to pound. It goes racing in his chest like an animal caged with a yearning to escape. The atmosphere is choking within the room, one that way makes it sound like the room is holding its breath in anticipation of action. The silence continues to stretch, taut and electric, and he could feel the tension coiling in the air around them.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Again, the sound occurs in a much heavier and more insistent repetition, booming like a drum beat in this stillness. Ethan has taken action toward the door, but just as he reaches for it, the walls appear to bend in upon themselves, warping and twisting in a way that does not conform to logic. The very floor beneath him feels that it is no longer solid but rather shifting and swelling, as if alive. Olivia gasps and reels back, eyes wide with horror, and fear is written all over Ethan's face.
"Ethan, what is happening?" she cries now, voice sharply rising; panic slowly adding to her fear.
Ethan says nothing. His mind races, battling with the reality of their situation. The knock—nothing just a noise. It has now become something that speaks, a summoning call that resonates somewhere deep in him. He hears it purely now with no one there to sound it.
Let me in.
The voice sounds broken, like a long, faded echo of his own, a warped reflection of himself making every nerve in him jolt. Thoughts begin to spin. His hands tremble with a violent urge to push back against the encroaching blackness. Now he felt the weight of the pull; the call from Room 4A had taken form, the very place that had now become a hell unto itself.
"No." He lured himself back from that abyss as he violently shook his head. Push the thoughts aside. At this moment, an urgency began to colour his tone. "We have to leave. Get out of here, now." Even as he said, Ethan could see the uncertainty flickering in Olivia's eyes.
Eyes wide with horror and shimmering with the sheen of the unshed tears, Olivia said, "You don't get it, Ethan. It's too late for that. We can't run from it. It finds us wherever we go. It's in the walls, in the mirrors... it's in us." These words hung in the air, heavy with profound truth, and Ethan felt a chill creeping over his bones.
The walls creaked ominously, the floors groaned beneath their feet. The very structure of the building now seemed a conscious being well aware of their presence. In an instant, the hallway outside their room was swallowed by darkness, an unrelenting void that seemed to extend onward for eternity. A low, guttural growl erupted through the halls of the building—humanity is incapable of producing this sound. It resonated from some deeper part, primal instinct that declared to them, Run.
For an instant, Ethan and Olivia exchange glances, glances that speak silently of the unspoken language of ignorance and reluctance. Their body screams to run away from the encroaching darkness, but the instinct to stay—to understand what is hunting them—roots them to the spot. The whisper becomes louder, cleaner, until it hits deafening.
Let me wear you.
The soft rustle in the corner draws Ethan's attention away, and he half-turns, his breath nearly caught in his throat. There in the shadows, standing motionless, is Irene. Her porcelain face is cracked; her eyes are way too wide; her smile is too strange. A smile so horrific it sends chills down his spine, laughing at the very soul of their fright.
"You shouldn't have come back," she says softly, her voice chilling like wind before a storm. "You can't stop it." Those words hung heavy in the air, and Ethan could almost feel the weight of her gaze pressing down upon him.
The room now feels colder than ever, the walls pressing tighter, and the air heavy with the weight of what wasn't being said. Ethan was stumbling backward, his mind barely holding onto the remnants of grasp on what Irene had just uttered. The reality of their situation crashed over him like a wave, dragging him under.
"Why?" he whispered, his voice hoarse, hardly a breath escaping his lips.
Irene took a slow, deliberate step forward, almost suffocating in her presence. "Because Room 4A never forgets. It takes what it wants. And now... it wants you." The words were dark prophecy, warnings sending shivers of terror down his spine.
The supernova behind them startled Ethan; he could turn around and see the door slam shut with a crashing force that rattled. Panic surged in, the air thick with fear and confusion. The shadows grew alive and seemed to swirl around them, and Ethan felt the walls closing in.
Olivia clenched his arm, her fingers digging in. "We have to find a way out, Ethan. We can't stay here, it's—"
CRASH.
The ground split open under them as a gaping hole of darkness emerged into nothingness. Out from it came an ever-evolving grotesquery, an anomaly barely human. Its limbs were gnarled and distorted; its face seemed to reflect each and every visage ever devoured by this hellhole, a collage of despair and horror.
Ethan gasped as a scream hung in his throat, choking him, yet no sound came forth. The scene before him filled him with an unbelievable horror and unreality, and he felt like he was entrapped in a waking nightmare. Olivia was dragging him back; she stumbled as the ground beneath them seethed, alive with a desire to swallow them.
"No!" she screamed, and there was a catch of desperation in her voice. "We can't let it take us!" But it was already too late. The thing—The Hollowed—had seen them, its eyes upon them with a glazing hunger.
Then silence filled the tomb of a different noise: a whisper in a thousand voices overlapping, all of whom he knew, all of which were Ethan's. The eerie throng of chittering swirled in the atmosphere enveloping them like a beautiful haunting, tugging at the very fabric of his being.
Let me wear you.
The shadows consumed them both, wrapping them like a shroud, dragging them into the depths of darkness. As the world faded away, Ethan could feel, bound with shared fear and bond of their terror, the inescapable truth: Room 4A has claimed them. It is then that it dawns upon him: the nightmare really only begins now, and the battle for their souls has only begun.